It is well known that deaf and hearing-impaired individuals often rely on lip reading and sign language interpretation, for example, to assist in understanding spoken communications. In many situations lip reading is difficult and does not, by itself, suffice. Likewise, sign language requires the presence of an interpreter who may not be readily available. In such instances, there have been various methods used to aid in comprehending the spoken communications. One of these methods is phonetic transcription. Phonetic transcription generally refers to the representation of perceived temporal segments of speech using the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet and is described in a commonly assigned and co-pending patent application Ser. No. 09/811,053, filed on Mar. 16, 2001 and entitled “Hierarchical Transcription and Display of Input Speech”.
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has also been conventionally employed as a communication tool to help comprehend spoken language. One problem with this tool, however, is that there is considerable delay between when a person speaks and when a speech recognition system translates and presents the decoded speech text. The relationship between what was said and the resulting recognized speech text is very important, at least in terms of verification and/or correction of the output from the ASR system. Because of the inherent delay which exists in the ASR system, a hearing-impaired user cannot completely ascertain the relationship between what was spoken and what was textually presented. Additionally, ASR is generally prone to errors in the decoded speech output.
Accordingly, there exists a need for techniques, for use by hearing-impaired or other persons, for improved comprehension of a particular utterance.